New work by Benjamin Love considers Visitor Welcome Center as a relation between public exhibition space and private living quarters. In the space, traces of habitation are strategically hidden from view during open gallery hours. It’s only at day’s end, when the lights dim and the front door is locked, that the gallery performs its more domestic functions.

Love conflates site-specificity, abstraction, and functionality to enhance Visitor Welcome Center’s domesticity with Waterbearer; a sculpture/pedestal that opens up to reveal a working shower enclosed within. Guised as an abstracted form on a plinth, its utility is the physical manifestation of the object making what is “private” – hidden from plain sight—into what’s public—an art object for communal viewing. Coffee Table with Blocks is installed in the gallery’s adjacent salon. The wooden forms placed on top of the table inhibit its functionality by co-opting usable surface space to mount a structural profusion.

The three drawings on the wall are templates of each of the pieces in the show, made after the sculptures were completed. These works invert the tenet “begin with the end in mind”— one of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” a best-selling self-help manual by Dr. Stephen R Corvey. According to Dr. Corvey, this auspicious habit is “based on imagination-- the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint.”

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Benjamin Love was born in Mountain Home, Idaho, in 1984. He received his BFA from Boise State University (2010), attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010), and was a fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ox-Bow Residency (2009). His work has recently been exhibited at 4 th Wall, Jancar Jones, Commonwealth and Council, and the Huntington Beach Art Center.